Government employees ready to gobble up the economy
Any perceived economic gains made in the last four years will more than be wiped out by the looming public pension crisis, The Washington Examiner‘s editorial board writes Sunday.
They write, in part:
State and local governments are getting squeezed ever more tightly and something is going to have to give. They will be forced to cut key services to residents, hit up taxpayers again with higher levies, or curtail pension benefits.
A survey this month by Loop Capital Markets found that only 58 of the 149 state-level pension plans it viewed were funded at 80 percent or more, the standard by which funds are judged to be financially healthy. The median funded ratio for state pension plans fell from 76 percent in 2010 to 73 percent in 2011.
What passed for good news here was that while Loop Capital said the situation was “bad,” it argued it was not “catastrophic.” Not yet anyway. States and local governments could still make up the shortfall.
That’s the most positive spin on the situation. The bipartisan State Budget Crisis Task Force used a colder, more clinical eye in a July report. It found that state and local governments underfunded their pension plans by more than $50 billion between 2007 and 2011. The shortfall will have to be made up.
The task force noted that under current actuarial assumptions the total unfunded liability is $1 trillion, but many economists believe those assumptions are far too generous. The real unfunded liability may be as high as $3 trillion. Why are pensions underfunded in the first place? Because elected officials have overpromised benefits and then failed to fill the coffers.
“California, Illinois, and New Jersey, with 19 percent of the nation’s population, accounted for more than half of the contribution shortfall. Between 1996 and 2011, Illinois underpaid contributions by $28 billion,” the task force report noted.
